


ocean without its unnamed monsters

by kindclaws



Category: The Expanse (TV), The Expanse Series - James S. A. Corey
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Alternate Universe - His Dark Materials Fusion, Character Study, Found Family, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-07
Updated: 2019-10-07
Packaged: 2020-10-24 07:29:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 10,561
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20702210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kindclaws/pseuds/kindclaws
Summary: Daemons aren't bound by the same laws of physics as their humans. They don't give or take heat. They're unaffected by low gravity or a vacuum. They don't need water or oxygen. But it still takes only a single glance to tell most Belter and Earther souls apart.(or - honestly, who brings a deer into space?)





	1. one

**Author's Note:**

> This fic follows mostly tv canon but borrows details from the books. The chapters correspond with the tv seasons and _shouldn't_ have spoilers for following ones. If they do, I am so sorry, please let me know.
> 
> If you're unfamiliar with His Dark Materials/The Golden Compass:  
\- Daemons are the manifestations of someone's soul in animal form, like patronuses in Harry Potter.  
\- Children's daemons can shape-shift at will, but puberty and/or defining events in their life make them "settle" into a permanent adult form. This is usually a huge cause for celebration.  
\- like astrological signs, mbti types, or your Hogwarts House: everyone has opinions on what your daemon's shape means and what kind of person you are. Sometimes they're right, sometimes they're wrong.  
\- Daemons frequently talk/play/fight/cuddle with each other, but humans talking to someone else's daemon is a little weird, and humans touching someone else's daemon is incredibly taboo and frequently painful for the person being touched. People with strong bonds (usually romantic) occasionally allow contact with their daemons, but this is very rare, intimate, and not really talked about in polite society.  
\- Daemons are formed of and collapse into golden Dust when their humans die, they cannot survive independently. They also cannot generally be separated from their humans, and usually cannot go more than 4-8 feet away from each other without pain and eventually death. For people with daemons, seeing a living person without a daemon would be like seeing someone walking around without a head - incredibly scary and upsetting.  
**PERMISSIONS:** Please do not download and save this fic locally. I make frequent revisions and don't like the idea of old versions being out there, and if I ever decide I hate it, I'll orphan it rather than delete it so you'll still be able to find and read it! I'm open to translations and podfics, but please contact me on tumblr first. Do not upload to other sites. Do not claim as your own.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **CONTENT WARNINGS:** canon-typical violence and Belter/Inner racism(?) matching season one's storyline. One character's daemon is a spider - if you are afraid of spiders, rest assured I am too, so I was sparse with its details.

Naomi has been awake for an hour already when the Canterbury's newest crew member enters the mess. She hears the quiet _clop_ of dainty hooves against the metal grill just before the low register of his voice, still hoarse with the traces of sleep. Her daemon's small, round ears flatten against his head and he slinks forward to lay a small hand on her arm.

"Relax," Naomi mutters. "I'm not going to fight him."

She sits as still as a statue at the edges of the mess hall, her terminal still open on an inventory of her latest hardware haul. The stranger from Earth does not notice her, making a beeline for the coffee machine. His daemon does, her ears twitching against the sides of her head, but that's hardly a surprise, she's prey. The captain said the newest hire was ex-military, but Naomi's never met a military type with a prey animal for a daemon. Come to think of it, maybe that's why he got kicked out. The doe blinks at her, long and slow, as her human rummages through the cupboards.

"Hazel," he says with the excitement of a child, "Look! Something that almost resembles coffee!"

Something ugly bubbles up inside of Naomi. _Typical Earther, sneering at the compromises the Belt has to make do with_. The coffee tastes fine to her. She struggles not to reveal any of her indignation on her face.

After a moment, the doe turns her head and replies to her human, her voice too soft for Naomi to hear. In the vast empty space of the mess hall before breakfast, she doesn't look so big. She'd come up to Naomi's ribs, maybe. But the Canterbury has a crew numbering in the hundreds, and soon they'll all be crowding the halls and the mess tables, bumping elbows and talking and trading tools and sensor data. The doe will seem bigger, then, surrounded by motion. Naomi thinks of the flow of traffic breaking around her bulk like a black hole bending light and gravity around it and presses her lips together in distaste. Humans evolved a lot of adaptations in the Belt. Long limbs, light bones, quick tempers.

Small daemons.

"Let's wake Amos," Umai suggests. She looks down at her terminal and sees that morning muster is closer than she thought.

"Fine," Naomi says, part of her brain already straying to the work ahead of them, the struts in the cargo bay that will need reinforcement now that she's bartered for material, the high-g chairs that will need a top-up of fluid before they go too deep into their journey. Yes, she may as well wake Amos. A small and spiteful part of her that she tries not to feed too often half-wishes she was working with a Belter today, someone who would bring up the new crew member on their own, mutter savagely about the size of his daemon without her prompting. If she wants to voice the quiet resentment that's been brewing in her since the captain said he was passing her over for XO, she'll have to bring it up herself, and Amos wouldn't _get it_. His Lysandra is a bobcat - larger than a Belter daemon, sure, but infinitely easier to deal with than an entire deer.

Honestly. Who brings a deer into space?

It's impossible to leave the mess hall without acknowledging the new crew member in some way, but Naomi still feels unsettled when Jim Holden looks up as she approaches the door and smiles. He has a nice smile, she's displeased to note. An easy, thoughtless one, like he's never struggled to find happiness. And he has arms nearly as muscled as Amos'. Naomi doesn't let her eyes linger. Umai snorts delicately into her ear.

"'Morning!" Holden says. "You're, ah - I saw you in the engineering bay, right?"

"That's right," Naomi says crisply. She slams drawers until she finds a breakfast ration that will satisfy Amos. Umai crouches on her shoulder, his little hands fisted in the collar of her overalls. His twitching tail tickles her back. She swats at it half-heartedly and he tugs on her earlobe in revenge.

"I'll see you around..." Holden says as she walks away, his voice trailing off for her to fill in her name.

"Yep," Naomi says instead. The doe says nothing, but Naomi can feel her reproachful eyes boring into her back.

Captain Shaddiq's daemon is a little diamond-headed snake that could eat Pip up in one bite. He's usually draped on her shoulders. The rookies joke that if he's ever not there, he's out hunting, slithering between the desks in the precinct looking for someone to sink his little fangs into.

If you've been on the payroll as long as Miller has, you don't joke about that.

Havelock, for all his faults, is too stoic, too convinced he has a chance of winning over the Belter cops to crack a joke like that. Miller tries not to like him for it. It's easier to pity the idiot for willingly transferring to Ceres, for taking the cases no one wants, for doing his best to learn Belter sign language as though his clumsy gestures of goodwill will win anyone over.

When Shaddiq gives him the kidnap job, Miller very briefly considers giving it to Havelock. His hound daemon's clever nose would make quick work of Juliette Mao's tracks, wouldn't it?

Miller's not sure why keeps the case, though it seems like such a waste of time. After, he'll come up with a lot of reasons. He'll say he felt some kinship with the girl, that he knows what it's like to have a soul with wings. He'll say he smelt the conspiracy, the rot covered over with the perfume of money. He'll say Pip wanted them to be a good person.

But the truth is, he knew if he didn't take it that he was just going to be drinking again, and that's starting to get boring.

As the shockwave of the Canterbury's destruction rushes towards them, Naomi drops her hand to her side and crams her long fingers through the grate of the daemon containment cage next to her seat. Umai grabs on immediately, pressing his furry face as close as the metal bars allow him. Naomi does not look down. She's not sure she could. As Holden shouts orders and Alex tells them to brace for impact and the Knight races for the shelter of an asteroid it will not reach in time, she stares hard at the monitor in front of her. The Knight's sensor lock jumps indecisively between glittering pieces of debris, fragments of ice and metal and her _friends_. The AI is incapable of positively identifying any of the debris as their Canterbury. Naomi is incapable, too.

The sound of the men shouting behind her seems distant, an afterthought to the pounding of her pulse in her ears. Naomi thinks about orbital mechanics. She thinks about the size of a hole a scrap of space debris the size of her finger can tear in a double-layered hull. When she was a kid she'd sometimes sneak into the greenhouse and look at the bugs they had lined up in neat little containers with breathing holes poked into the lids. She doesn't want to be a bug.

The containment cages for small size daemons are built into the seats for a reason. The last thing you want is for your daemon to go flying away from you while you're strapped in for a high-G burn, your soul banging off the walls of a shuttle until it gets knocked far enough for the connection between you to snap and kill you instantly. The second fundamental rule of daemon space travel emphasized in every safety procedure is that no one will get out of their chairs to help you. That's why Naomi double and triple-checked the harness keeping Holden's doe secured near him, because they don't make cages in her size out here.

The first fundamental rule is that you don't put your daemon in danger to begin with.

Seconds before impact, Naomi lets go of Umai's hand and flips open the two safety releases on his cage. He headbutts the door open and grabs onto her outstretched arm, clambering up to her shoulder in two quick leaps. In the next seat, Shed looks over to see her breaking the first rule and makes a choked sound of worry that is nearly lost over the sound of the Knight's engines pushed to their limits. Umai wraps his arms around her neck and clings for dear life. Naomi holds him close, feeling their staccato heartbeat, and closes her eyes.

She expects to die.

She opens her eyes. _How are we not dead?_ she thinks groggily. Everyone on the Canterbury is gone. Everyone she's worked with for nearly seven years. What's another five empty graves?

When they get out of their seats on unsteady legs, Holden's eyes immediately go to Umai, still clinging to Naomi's neck like a small child, his furry face buried in her tattoo. Naomi sees him open his mouth to reprimand her for letting her daemon out. He closes it. Opens it again, and then shakes his head violently. His eyes look haunted, the gaze of a man coming undone.

She's not relieved when he turns his attention away to assessing the damage to the shuttle and angrily speculating about the origins of that ship. _The one that killed the Cant_, her mind supplies, distant and unfocused.

She's not relieved. Relief would imply some level of shame or regret, some sense that she'd made a mistake by reaching for Umai despite protocol. Naomi regrets many things, but she does not regret not wanting to die alone.

Later, when they've done all that they can to repair the Knight and Holden has sent out that damned broadcast and the MCRN's fucking flagship is speeding towards them, later, they all lie on the floor in a puddle of human and daemon. Shed's scorpion clicks its claws weakly at Alex's greyhound, whose ribcage is fluttering with each gasping breath Alex takes. Holden's doe is surprisingly small when she's curled up, her hooves daintly tucked underneath her. Naomi watches her ears twitch. Holden's already unconscious. The doe turns towards Naomi and bends her long neck low to the floor.

"Can you forgive us?" she asks softly.

_For logging the distress signal, and getting them all killed?_

"I don't know if it really matters," Naomi wheezes, but what she really means is that she's not sure she gets to decide that.

"It would matter to us," the doe says. _Hazel_, Naomi thinks to herself. She knows her name. She's known it all along. It's just easier to call her the doe, to put that layer of separation between them. Maybe there's little point to that at the end of things, now that they're dying and they're the last ones awake. _Hazel._ Strange name for an Earther's daemon. They're always named something long and pretentious with too many syllables. Hazel could be the name of a Belter's daemon. Something short and simple. A prayer you can get out in high-G when every breath counts.

"You're forgiven," Umai says. He shuffles forward and cups Hazel's soft brown cheek with one of his hands. Hazel and Naomi both sigh at the contact. She can feel it, very distantly. It feels like peace. Hypoxia's not a bad way to go. Naomi's against it in principle, but in practice it's just like falling asleep.

"Good night, Holden," Naomi whispers, and then the Knight shudders at the touch of a docking clamp. Red Martian lasers cut through the rush of fresh oxygen and paint their bodies with targets. For a second, Naomi wonders if it would have been better to suffocate.

As a kid Alex always wanted to become the sort of someone that crowds would part for, a lion, or a bear, or an eagle of some kind. It is not the sort of sentiment that the son of diligent Martian terraformers should have. They named him Aashritha, hoping he would grow up to be someone who gives shelter. Someone who would remake Mars' barren wastes into home.

But Alex is helpless against the instincts that made him look up at the sky instead. He wants, very badly, to do something more than planting a few trees. Aashritha flickers between bird forms like con men flip weighted coins. The bond between them doesn't allow her to go very far but she circles a few feet over his head like a vulture, wearing the body of a gull and then a falcon and then a sandpiper. Beneath her Alex feels like roadkill in the making, one unremarkable life away from becoming meat on bones. So he signs up for the MCRN and holds still when his siblings call him selfish, when his father spits that he is breaking his mother's heart.

His mother is the hardest to disappoint.

"But Alex," she says, her lip trembling. "My little _Aashritha_. We thought - do you know what it means? Your name?"

He looks her in the eye though every part of him wants to sink into the ground with shame.

"Yes," he says. They tell this story a lot. Tell him he should keep his head and his feet on the ground.

"We hoped you would build a home with us," Alex's mother sobs. "I don't want to lose you to the heavens. Space is cold, baby, it's cold and it doesn't love you. Stay home. Stay with your family and build Mars."

"I don't want to build something I won't live to see, ma," Alex says. "I'm sorry. I want to fly. I always have."

But the MCRN isn't what he thought it would be. It's just drills and a hangar full of uniformed recruits yelling _sir yes sir_ in such harmony he half-thinks he hasn't left home yet. He doesn't salute his supervisor fast enough and she makes him drop down and do fifty pushups. He can't _do_ fifty pushups. He can't convince her it's not out of disrespect, either. Alex's hands itch to get on the controls of a ship. He wants to fly. He needs to fly. He needs it to be worth it.

Three days into boot camp, Aashritha settles as a greyhound.

"A dog?" he asks her, trying to keep his voice down in the barracks, trying to remember when she last changed forms. She was a falcon for breakfast, she knows, her talons digging into his shoulder as he slopped porridge into a metal tin, and she was quiet all through the morning's orbital mechanics lecture. It seems absurd that his daemon should have chosen her final, life-long form without him noticing.

"I like this body," Aashritha says, a little moody. Like him, she is not very good at taking criticism, real or perceived.

"I just," Alex says, nervously running a hand through his hair. It is getting too long. He should have asked his mother to cut it before he left home. He should have asked her what to do if the moment of adulthood passed him by without stopping for tea. "I thought we were going to be a bird, is all," he says lamely.

That's not all, but he's not willing to bring it up.

"We can still fly," Aashritha says with a sniff. "We get access to the flight simulators in a few weeks. That'll show them."

They make it another four days before one of the physical trainers notices she hasn't changed form in a while.

"So that's it, then?" the lieutenant asks, his face sallow under the fluorescent lighting. "You've settled?"

"Guess so," Alex mutters.

"There's nothing wrong with a dog," the lieutenant says absently, making a note on his clipboard for medical. "Especially in the military. Dogs are good soldiers. Loyal, obedient, disciplined."

Alex tries not to glower too visibly. It's just that none of the heroes in those old Wild West movies he and his sister used to eat up like candy ever saved the day by being _obedient_. Eventually, getting himself honourably discharged, after all that, feels like a little bit of a relief. He wonders if he was trying to get the last word with the universe.

When the Donnager picks up the Knight, the Martians on-board take one look at his past service history with them and at Aashritha’s perfect stillness and give him separate quarters from the rest. That’s the advantage of having a dog daemon. No one expects you to cause trouble. Alex dons a uniform again for the first time in a while, and exhales heavily. Aashritha lays her head on his knee as they wait to be reunited with the other Cant survivors, and Alex, after a moment, raises his hand and scratches her neck gently.

That was some good flying they did out there. The sort their younger self would have dreamed of. He didn’t think being a hero would feel so hollow.

Her name is Juliette Andromeda Mao, she's 22 years old, her daemon is a razorbill named Iphigenia, and her pinky finger is probably more valuable than Miller's entire life. He lets himself into her apartment with the skeleton key so generously provided by Star Helix and washes the extra shampoo out of his hair in her bathroom. Pip preens herself on the counter, secretly pleased to indulge in a little off-the-books luxury. There's no unspoilt food in the kitchenette but there's beer that's better than the kind he gets. He cracks one open and goes digging through her files, partially for clues, and partially because he can.

The emails between her and her parents are interesting, as are the drafts of the replies she never sent back, each walking a razor-sharp line between different emotional reactions.

Miller looks up razorbills in a daemonology database even though the personality analysis stuff is all bullshit, anyway. It's a nearly-extinct seabird, black and white, monogamous, capable of deep dives. He reads the measurements carefully and tries to imagine Julie's soul perched on the armrest of her couch. Of course, she'd have to be sitting close too. He wonders what she'd say about him picking through her emails and flight logs. The daemonology database has some extra bullshit in the listing, some mumbo jumbo about a personality so vague and rose-coloured it could belong to most people who think highly enough of themselves. _Razorbill_, Miller mouths to himself as his eyes skim over words like _loyal_ and _thrill-seeking_. She's just some rich girl looking to flip off daddy, wanting to play at being a god on the losing side. _Razorbill_, Miller whispers, swiping his screen back to that footage of her fight in the docks. He watches her deck a guy twice her size. Iphigenia circles overhead between the ceiling struts.

He swipes back to her emails and keeps reading. The most recent email is from her father, and it’s a very different tone. Miller sets the beer down. The last line of the email is in all caps; _FOR YOUR OWN SAFETY COME HOME NOW._ It’s dated two weeks before the Canterbury’s explosion and the subsequent riots on Ceres. How did Jules-Pierre Mao know the Belt would become dangerous before any one else? Miller goes back to that surveillance footage and watches the way she walks, like an Earther, with her eyes fixed on a horizon she’s so sure she’ll get to.

So it’s not the easy runaway case he thought it would be.

He goes home and dreams that he's flying above an endless ocean, no coast in any direction. It should terrify him but it doesn't, not at first. When he dreams about being a sparrow he always feels so heavy, he always flaps his wings twice for every beat Pip would. As soon as he thinks about her she's there, the tip of her wings brushing against his on the downbeat.

_You ever seen something like this, Pip?_ he asks, even though it's a stupid question. Pip's seen only what he's seen in his life, except sometimes from slightly different angles. There's no ocean on Ceres. Miller tries to conceptualize it. He knows it's salty and capable of drowning people and that's about it. Salt. The most saltwater he's ever seen in his life are tears, and even that has always struck him as a waste of viable drinking water, nevermind the long showers he takes in Julie's apartment. Whole oceans of water you can't drink. What a waste.

As if she's heard him the razorbill plunges beneath the waves, and Miller is helplessly borne along, unable to wake. He tries to breathe and chokes on the inescapable taste of salt. Iphigenia dives deeper and deeper, streams of fish vanishing on either side of their eyes, while he begs her to let him go. He's done, he's had enough, he wants off this ride. Distantly he can hear Pip's shrill birdsong somewhere above the waves.

He wakes up to find her pecking at the back of his hand hard enough to draw blood.

"Fuck, Pip," he says with a groan, sitting up slowly through the blinding headache in his head.

"You were shouting," she says, batting her wings once, twice before gently floating to a rest on his shoulder. "A nightmare?"

"We don't have nightmares," Miller grumbles. He stumbles to his terminal and brings up a projection of Julie Mao's last known flight path. He half expects to find an ocean in the void of space.

“First Lieutenant James R. Holden, of Montana,” the Martian with the lean face says. A salamander perches on his shoulder, its wet feet splayed over the epaulets of his uniform. It has an unblinking stare, like its human, and Holden finds himself wondering if it _could_ blink, if it were so inclined.

“Yes, sir,” he says flatly, dragging himself back to the interrogation with reluctance.

“Seven years in the UNN, last posting on the destroyer Zhang Fei.” The interviewer’s gaze strays very deliberately to Hazel, who stomps a hoof against the floor impatiently. The focus drugs he’s taken to interview Holden wouldn’t allow him to get distracted like that, so he’s changing focus on purpose. Letting Holden see, that’s on purpose too. “That’s a long time to serve for someone of your… temperament.”

Because Hazel is a doe. Because she is prey. Because he hasn’t seen her put her hoof through someone’s foot yet.

“I think the broadcast I sent out is an accurate enough assessment of my temperament, Lieutenant,” Holden snaps. The salamander opens its mouth wide and it almost looks like it’s laughing.

“You were dishonorably discharged for assaulting a superior officer,” the interviewer says.

“He deserved it. Ordered me to fire on a Belter ship,” Holden says.

“A smuggler - “

“Who was smuggling _people_.”

An impasse. The Donnager trembles very faintly underneath them. When Holden closes his eyes he still sees the last image of the Canterbury on the sensors, a ripple of white-blue light, a mass graveyard at the center of a tiny supernova. Static. The memory of a gasp is slowly fading despite his best efforts.

“Torpedo launches?” Holden asks softly, _bitterly_. “Who’s firing on Belters now?”

Chrisjen has been looking for lynchpins to pull her whole life.

It’s rarely that simple. When she watched that projection of Mars get tangled up in little glowing threads, each representing a panicked call to another Martian shipyard, the solution felt elegant to her. A few careful words there, a significant look there, and Franklin did all the work for her, sending a ripple of panic through the Martians that exonerated them for the Canterbury’s destruction.

And it _was_ elegant. Like a single domino knocked over. A single butterfly’s wings ripped off. In the security briefing, for a moment, she felt euphoric, watching it come together, feeling the relief pour through the floodgates that maybe, maybe, they’ll manage to dodge another potential war with Mars.

Now, sitting beside Franklin with her hand loosely clutching a bottle of wine she knows he wants, it doesn’t feel so elegant. She knew there’d likely be consequences for manipulating him. She knew. She’s no fool. But it didn’t quite feel real, nor did it feel important, not in the face of the millions of lives she probably saved at the cost of his.

“You know what I love most about Mars?” Franklin asks. He can’t look at her, or he won’t. “They still dream. We gave up. They’re an entire culture dedicated to a common goal, working together as one to turn a lifeless rock into a garden. We had a garden and we paved it.”

Chrisjen’s scalp tickles as Abhay creeps closer to her hairline like a particularly frightening hairpiece.

“They couldn’t do any of that without Earth,” Chrisjen points out. “Earth must come first.”

“My diplomatic credentials have been revoked,” Franklin says with a bitter laugh. “I’ve been banned from Mars for life.”

Franklin’s heartbreak is difficult to sit with, as is her own lack of regret. She wonders if he hears the message underneath the words. Earth must come first, as must her goals. Mars, and his work, his reputation, his dream of retiring in the Mariner Valley - all victims now. But she had to smoke out the murderers of the Canterbury. Surely he must understand. Surely.

His snowy owl daemon, once so familiar to her, now sits on his other side, his whole body a barrier between her and his soul. She hasn’t looked at Chrisjen once this conversation and that coldness hurts.

“We may have stopped a war,” she tells him, and her heart falls as he fails to explicitly forgive her. As they speak, she is strangely afraid it will be the last time she sees him. He is already halfway through a goodbye, and Chrisjen is not ready. She thinks he might be the last person left in the solar system who has known her nearly as long as she has known herself, and suddenly she is feeling something that is very close to regret without becoming it at all.

“You will do anything to win,” Franklin says, finally looking at her with watering eyes. “I won’t play with you, ever again. You spun a beautiful web, Chrisjen.”

“Trapdoor spiders don’t spin webs,” she says, an automatic reproach, one hand flying up to her hair to touch Abhay. Franklin laughs bitterly again and shakes his head.

“It was a metaphor, Chrisjen. Goodnight.”

He walks away without another look, and Chrisjen waits until he is out of sight to reach up and pick Abhay out of her hair. She puts him on her collarbone where she can feel the bristle of his eight legs against her skin.

“We would do it again,” Abhay tells her.

“Yes,” Chrisjen agrees, closing her eyes in pain. “We would do it again, if we had to.”

Being a good zero-g mechanic is only partially about your skills - the other part is finding a space cage that will fit your daemon. Most of them - the mid-size ones - clip onto an EVA suit like a backpack, keeping your soul close and out of the way when you're working on repairing a hull breach. On the Cant little daemons got you higher pay - daemon cages are expensive, and the Captain got to sidestep those costs if you had a daemon you could tuck into your helmet.

Naomi says there's a third part to being a good mechanic; that you need to control the innate fear every human has of deep space, but Amos can't relate. It's probably true, because Naomi doesn't lie or make shit up for poetry, but it doesn't seem particularly relevant to Amos. The first time he spacewalked was as part of a big group getting certified out on Ceres. The certification was a joke - a way for some clever little shitweasel of a Belter to get some coin from you and give you a stamp of approval that you managed to go and look at the stars without painting the inside of your helmet with vomit, but most of the haulers coming in and out of Ceres demanded some proof that you could spacewalk without losing your head before they hired you.

So Amos paid up. The shitweasel of the day had handed out a bunch of EVA suits that had been patched over so many times that the original garments alone would have been mesh revealing enough to make a hooker blush, and Amos had packed Lysandra's bulk into a cage too small for her, and out the airlock they'd gone.

By the time the shitweasel told his 'students' to look down at their feet and slowly raise their heads up, Amos was already staring head on at the void over his head, listening to the others retch and moan over the radio. He turned it off for some peace and quiet and wondered what the big deal was. Baltimore had been smoggy enough that they couldn't see the stars, most of the time, but Amos saw them once or twice. They were no bigger or closer from Ceres, just clearer maybe, sharper, no atmosphere to distort the edges of light. _That's all?_ he thought, a little bored, a little disappointed in himself.

Years pass. Sometimes people try to kill Amos. Sometimes he repays the favour. It's all in a day's churn.

Naomi hires him a few unremarkable years later.

She catches Amos' attention right from the start. Umai makes him think of her echo. Like her he's long-limbed, wide-eyed, always watching, always held apart from the others, some kind of secret held tight behind those little teeth. He's a small enough species of monkey that he could fit in Naomi's helmet if they really wanted him to, but they clearly don't. The first time Amos goes on a spacewalk with them, he almost laughs in delight. Umai doesn't go into Naomi's helmet or in a daemon cage on her back. She's got a harness for him, clearly custom-made, snug and secure around his tiny elongated torso, two different lines attaching him to Naomi's EVA suit.

There's a lot that could go wrong. The lines could snap, the harness could fray, the harness could slip right over his head, the lines could get tangled in something. It doesn't really matter. On a spacewalk there's already a lot that could go wrong. There's only a temporary piece of atmosphere and some fabric trapping it to your body. Spacewalks are already flirting with death. Naomi's just flirting with it a little harder than most. Not to show off, either. She's one of the best mechanics not just because she's good but because Umai is right there in the thick of it with her, not locked away in a cage on her back waiting for the job to be over but sticking his tiny little monkey hands into ship guts with her, holding her tools before they float off into the void.

Funny, Amos spends so much time on that first spacewalk thinking about all the ways Umai's harness could fail and kill them, that he doesn't really wonder about his own daemon. Lysandra isn't big, compared to the average Earther, but she's pushing the size limits for a mechanic. The cage the Canterbury scrounged up for her is old and worn, the metal straining at the joints.

It snaps on the way back to the airlock and Lysandra digs her claws into Amos' EVA suit as the slow sleepy spin of the Cant leaves her behind. She doesn't get enough of a grip, only tears enough holes into Amos' suit that it starts blaring oxygen and pressure leak alarms in his ears. Naomi doesn't hesitate - just thrusts Umai out with enough momentum that he soars through the void and latches onto Lysandra, his little hands clinging tightly to her fur. Naomi reels their daemons back in with Umai’s tethers. The steely determination in her eyes is illuminated by the EVA's visor light. Amos isn't sure she actually breathes until they're all back in the airlock with the air rushing in and she can let go of the tears in his suit she'd been pinching shut.

"You okay?" Umai asks Lysandra.

Lysandra hasn't talked to another daemon in years, and they're not about to start now. She slinks under Amos' arm and starts licking her paws with short, aggravated strokes.

"We're fine," Amos says.

"You're lucky you have a long range," Naomi says. Amos' eyes flicker to the long line of her neck, exposed by the removed helmet. Her pulse flickers rapidly under her jaw. Amos' supposed near-death experience has scared her more than it has scared him. She's too smart. Her neck is thin and fragile, a Belter’s build. Amos’ knuckles would do a lot of damage, quickly. The airlock’s security feed runs live to the bridge. That could pose difficulties, but Amos has gotten off of prison barges before. He'll do it again if he has to.

Amos meets Naomi’s eyes, waits for her to catch on, waits for the suspicion, the revulsion. It doesn't come. Maybe it won't come until later, when she's replaying the moment as she's falling asleep and realizes Amos should have been dead before she got her hands on the tear in his suit.

"We'll get you a new cage, next supply stop," Naomi says. "That is, if you're still willing to go out."

That gives Amos pause.

"Why wouldn't I be?"

“You’re not scared of going back out there?” Naomi asks.

“No.”

He's not scared of anything.

“Oh,” she says. “Well, that’s good. You have lots of potential. Come on, I want you to check the helium-lox tanks with me.”

And that’s that.

The Tachi - or the Rocinante, now - is built for Martian proportions, and its interior is sleek and compact enough that the tops of Naomi’s curls brush the ceiling of most corridors. The heavy treads of their magboots echo deafeningly throughout the ship, as does the silence of the Martian lieutenant whose last act was to get them onboard, who Holden is sure would be making his thoughts heard quite loudly if he were still alive. His absence makes the Rocinante feel even more empty and haunting and not their own. He keeps catching himself thinking that this is only temporary, that they'll rendezvous with the Cant soon, that he'll sleep in his own bunk and use his own razor and - then he remembers. It hurts just as badly the hundredth time after.

The Roci is far smaller than the Canterbury or any UNN vessel Holden served on, but he's never had so much space before, not since he left Montana. Holden closes his eyes and imagines every crew member who died on the Cant standing in these halls. The chaos. Chatter between humans and daemons, sweeping Belter gestures occasionally smacking passerbys in the face, a constant roil of movement, like a pot stirring. They couldn't all fit. He and Hazel wouldn't fit. They barely fit on the Cant but he'd take it back in an instant. 

Now there's just Holden and Naomi and Alex and Amos, and enough ghosts to staff a warship three times over. It'll be hard work for just the four of them, but after all those hours doing nothing on the Knight but waiting to die, Holden is kind of grateful there will be plenty to do.

But first, sleep. He finds an empty bunk - no shortage of those around here, he thinks, half-hysterical - and ruffles the blankets to claim it for his own. Hazel's hoofbeats come to a stop just outside in the hallway. Her head is tilted thoughtfully at him.

"Spartan," she says. "Even for the MCRN."

"Just come in," he says.

He gets onto the narrow cot to make room. When the door closes behind her, there's just barely enough room between the cot and the walls for Hazel to sit down, her knobby legs folded, her narrow and pointed face resting near his pillow. They will have to pull some coordinated three-point maneuvers if he wants to get out around her, but for the first time in a very long time, Holden feels that he is exactly the right size for his surroundings.

Pip is light enough to perch on the brim of Miller's hat. If she's not fluttering above him, her beady little eyes searching for trouble as her sporadic wing beats buoy her up and let her fall, she'll be there, the hat's brim only slightly dipped under her weight.

He's always liked her up there, like a second set of eyes, close enough to flutter to his ear and whisper if she sees something he doesn't. Miller's never had reason to fear for her before, because even among the worst of the Belters, one rule is always expected. You don't mess with another man's daemon. You don't, because if you do, the next open season will be on yours.

Something's different after he finds out about the Anubis and strolls out of Julie's apartment with a bounce in his step, his mind already thinking two moves ahead. Maybe because there's more money riding on this than ever before. Maybe because this is bigger than Ceres, and Earth and Mars have enough weight to throw around that they're okay with breaking the taboo over one shitty Belter cop.

Whatever it is, it happens like this - he strolls out of Julie's apartment and neither he nor Pip are looking back, because they finally have a direction to move forward in and a sense of urgency accompanying it. Someone reaches out. They have their sleeve pulled down, a meagre barrier between daemon and skin, but it slips when they grab Pip. One moment she's on the brim of his hat where she belongs, and the next she's in someone's fist, their fingertips brushing her feathers the wrong way. The contact lasts only a few seconds until they shove her into a kitschy souvenir birdcage but it's enough to bring Miller down to his knees, clutching at his stomach and throat to tamper down the nausea that comes with a stranger's touch on his soul. It's not right. It's not.

They get human on human assault hourly. Tons of daemons wailing on daemons in tiny feral proxy wars on a daily basis. But Star Helix only deals with about one human versus daemon case a year, and more often than not, the perpetrator is floated out an airlock without further trial or fuss.

That's how wrong it is.

Miller's eyes water and he sucks in deep, wheezing breaths as he tries to recover. He hasn't gotten his bearings back before the asshole with the birdcage starts walking away, and as the distance between Miller and Pip grows it hurts like a massive fishhook trapped between his ribs. Pip slams her tiny feathery body against the metal grill as Miller staggers helplessly after her captor. The people milling about in the causeway move out of Miller's way, no one quite willing to touch him. Maybe it's the look on his face, maybe it's the look on the face of the asshole with the birdcage, maybe it's Pip's frantic chirps. Whenever he gets too close to the cage, his shaking hands reaching for his trapped soul, the asshole's friends double around and give him a quick punch to the gut, shove him around a little. They never keep him far back enough to kill him, just enough that he never gets a hold of himself, and Miller has no choice but to follow as the edges of his vision start to bleed black and he forces one foot in front of the other. The birdcage bobs through a crowd.

He has to hand it to them. It's a _very_ effective way of transporting someone unwilling to be transported.

The real beating, when it comes, is a relief, because they give him Pip's birdcage to cradle to his chest. Miller doesn't remember much of the questions they ask. He curses them at every opportunity and tries not to look too longingly at his hat as Dawes tosses it from hand to hand.

_Give it back,_ he thinks. He shouldn't have hid the memory drive inside the seam if his hat. _Stupid_. Of course they'd target it. It's a symbol. If Dawes gives the hat back, if the memory drive escapes unscathed, it will have been worth it. He'd let them drag Pip around in a birdcage all over Ceres in exchange for the memory drive's safety. He'd let them sink their claws into her if it was penance enough.

When Dawes finally throws his hat back into his face, Miller expects to feel some relief or some grim pleasure at having gotten away with something.

But he just feels tired.

Fred Johnson is waiting for them on Tycho’s docks, almost alone. Holden tracks two guards at the end of the corridor; armed, mismatched armour. Older than the usual teenage trigger-happy kids usually pulling security in the Belt, so he resolves to keep an eye on them. Fred Johnson - and Holden thinks of him like that, both names running together like one - occupies the majority of his attention and of the tunnel he’s waiting in. He’d be an imposing enough presence on his own without his daemon snuffling behind him, a massive grizzly bear with a scarred muzzle and fur that glows blue-gray underneath the harsh artificial light. Amos’ bobcat daemon, usually a solid contender in intimidations, is dwarfed in her presence, to say nothing of how slender and fragile Hazel looks in comparison.

Fred has little patience for their bluff. The bear blows a hot huff of air through her nostrils as they lie and it sounds almost like a laugh. Fred gives them a lingering look as he turns his back, daring them to follow him deeper into Tycho and hear his proposal. The bear lingers a moment longer, her movements slow and deliberate. When she finally follows her human down the corridor, her footsteps thump against the floor louder than anyone’s magboots. It’s difficult to see anything of Tycho station beyond her furry silhouette and it makes Hazel antsy.

In the relative safety of his office, Fred speaks quietly, in a low voice that carries with it a certain confidence. It’s not that Fred is expecting to be listened to. It’s that he’s been listened to, and taken seriously, for so much of his life that Holden thinks he’s never questioned that. It reminds him, uncomfortably, of the way one of his mothers would speak to him when he was young and misbehaving.

The bear lays her massive head upon her paws in the corner of the office and does not say anything to their daemons. But the alertness in her eyes suggests that she is only pretending to appear unaffected by their arrival, and not very well.

Holden agrees to go looking for Lionel Polanski, whoever the fuck that is, partially just to get the hell out of that room and away from the bear. The size of that jaw makes him shudder, later, when there's no one to see.

Amos would like sex a lot more if people didn't insist on dragging their souls into it as often as they do. He's a good lay, he's sure of that much, and he likes getting down on his knees and putting his mouth on someone until the world falls away. It's calming. Meditative. Repetitive motions with a positive sum. His body is good enough to get the job done, but apparently, it's off-putting that his daemon isn't willing to cuddle with others.

It's all fun and games until someone thinks they need to touch Lysandra even though they promised not to, and then she's got some reckless creature pinned underneath her claws and the person that was so happy to writhe under Amos' tongue a moment ago is now trying to stab his daemon with a high heel.

"I told you not to touch her," Amos says as he gets his pants back on, and Lysandra follows him out the door, silent and impassive. It should be simple, and it isn't. Sex doesn't have to be this whole _thing_, with soul-to-soul connections straight out of a soap opera.

Tycho station is more of the same old. Someone with smokey eyes giggles into the crook of Amos' neck.

"You want to come back to my place?" he asks.

"Sure," Amos says easily. "But your daemon doesn't get to touch mine."

Fingers stroke his chest.

"There's a story behind that, sweetheart, isn't there?"

"Not really."

Not one that matters.

Julie Mao drags herself into the shower to die because she is, at heart, a seabird, and in the back of her feverish, furious mind, she has the vague notion that water will fix everything.

When she gets there her hands scramble at the handles, smearing glowing blue goo against the shower tiles. It's a useless endeavour. There's no water; some previous inhabitant of this rented room must have used up the whole ration. Julie screams and slams her fists against the tile. Only Iphigenia, hopping closer and crooning gently, stops her from cutting her hands open and bleeding blue. Ha! All the jokes about her blue blood. If only they could see her now.

"You must conserve your strength," Iphigenia urges. "The OPA will send someone - "

"No one's coming," Julie croaks. It's been days. Iphigenia ruffles her wings in alarm and nervously preens at at a flight feather bent out of shape. Whatever's happening to Julie, whatever was growing around that reactor and is now growing under her skin, it's not affecting her daemon. Not like that. But Iphigenia is growing weak with her. They won't last long.

And if by some miracle the OPA does send someone to check on her distress calls, she's going to ask them to shoot her.

"After everything I gave," Julie sobs. They won't come for her. Why haven't they come?

She closes her eyes and dreams that she is back in the Razorbill, stars racing past and left in her wake. In all her happiest memories she's going fast enough to cause an extinction event. Her dreams hurtle back to Earth, back to the home that is and isn't a home. The tree she learned to shoot at is within sight, so familiar to her it feels like a punch to the gut. Her father isn't there, but his daemon is, standing on one leg in the pond in the garden. Julie looks around, sure that she'll find him bent over somewhere nearby, pruning shears in hand, obsessively tending to the immaculate plants. But there is only the blue heron in front of her, as still as a statue.

"I want to wring your skinny little neck," Julie seethes, miming the motion with her hands. In the dream she is and she isn't covered in those horrible crystalline growths. The pain never goes away, not even in the dreams, but as the light shifts over the garden sometimes her skin is whole and unblemished again. Sometimes the blue cracks through, and then it's gone again, and then it's back, and then she's young and safe again. Julie took quantum mechanics with the rest of her siblings, she knows the basics of superposition. She is and she isn't. She is dying and she is her father's daughter. She is afraid and she is defiant once more. All are true until she looks, until she is measured, and then the act of perception forces reality one way or the other.

After a long moment the heron turns her head to fix Julie with one beady eye.

"What mess have you made this time, Juliette?" Zarathustra asks.

"I was trying to clean up yours," Julie yells. "It's not right, what you're doing. That _thing_, it's unholy. It's in me, dad. _It's in me!"_ she howls.

The heron barely moves.

"How long have you been planning the end of the world?" Julie asks. "Did you know when I was born? Did you know you were going to sacrifice me when you named me Iphigenia? _Tell me!"_

"Come home, Juliette," Zarathustra says.

"Maybe I fucking will," Julie seethes.

In the shower of a grimy flophouse on Eros, the razorbill climbs into Julie's outstretched palm and curls up, tucking her black and white head underneath one wing. When Julie finally dies, Iphigenia doesn't move. Just turns into golden dust and drifts away like all untethered souls do.

Until Eros, Holden has never killed someone. Not someone with a soul. He pulls the trigger and Hazel's knobby legs fold beneath her. The man jerks back with the force of the bullet's impact and in the very same moment his daemon bursts into golden dust, sucked into the air filters before his body has even hit the ground. 

Holden stumbles to the nearest wall and throws up while Miller looks on with an air of vague disapproval. 

When he finally manages to right himself again, Hazel is still on the floor, her legs tucked underneath her as daintily as if she was lying down for a nap. Her expression is very calm but her eyes are glassy. 

"Hazel?" he asks hoarsely. He's afraid she won't look at him, or that she won't get to her feet. That after everything - the Scopuli, the Cant, now the nightmare on Eros - killing someone was the final straw and she's just ceased to believe in him. If she doesn't want to keep walking, then that's it. He'll sit down next to her and they'll wait to die and that will be all. It won't take long, not with the dose of radiation he got. 

After a long, brutal moment, Hazel slowly turns her head to look at him.

"I'm okay," she says, reluctantly, her voice distant and dream-like. She stands back up like a newborn foal, unsteady on her hooves, knees trembling. The smart thing to do would be to keep both hands on the gun, but Holden rests one on her back as they follow Miller down the corridor, just at the curve where her neck meets her shoulders. He can feel muscle and sinew moving under his palm with every step she takes, her bony shoulder blades protruding beneath short and brittle fur. 

When he closes his eyes he imagines her shattering into dust, but it's blue and pulsing and twisted instead of gold. He is shivering quite badly. It might be the radiation, but it might just be horror. Eventually, the difference doesn't matter.

Sadavir's daemon is a blue-ringed octopus, a fact that immediately endeared him to Chrisjen when they met. He wears her in a tiny sealed aquarium around his neck hanging on a golden chain that glints beneath his collar. The aquarium itself is small, small enough to cup in his palm, the edges curved so as to dull the bump of her cage against his chest when he walks or moves. It was easy for him and Chrisjen to bond over having ugly, terrible daemons that make other people shudder and back away. Chrisjen knows there is all sorts of daemon lore out there, peddled by fools who think they can judge a man so simply as by the form of his soul, but Chrisjen has never given that much credence.

Not until Jules-Pierre Mao.

Chrisjen keeps her eyes locked on Sadavir's as he smiles at her, hand outstretched, wordlessly asking if she will lie with him. From the vantage point of her hair, Abhay clicks his mandibles together and looks at Sadavir's daemon through the kaleidoscope gaze of eight eyes. It has never been easy to read her, not when she is so small and so still within her aquarium. Today there is nothing, no discolouration in her rings, no intent in the gentle pulsing of her body.

The blue-ringed octopus carries enough venom in its tiny body to kill twenty six adult humans in minutes. This fact has always seemed like a fun curiosity to Chrisjen before, a theoretical situation, since the real animal that Sadavir molded himself after went extinct several centuries ago when temperatures in the Indian ocean rose too high to accommodate sea-life. For the first time the danger seems relevant. For the first time, they are playing on truly opposite sides.

Chrisjen smiles beatifically and accepts his outstretched hand. She has paralytic venom of her own, if it comes to that.

Holden is going to die on Eros, on the docks above the Roci's airlock, because there's no chance in hell he's carrying a fucking deer down a ladder in his condition.

Miller has fewer qualms about their worsening condition, or maybe just fewer reasons to resent it. Holden thinks part of the man is still crouching at the side of that girl in the flophouse bathroom, one hand reached out to tell her she's been found. His daemon, a little sparrow, sits tucked into his collar with her feathers fluffed and does not move or speak to Hazel. She doesn't even react much when Miller topples over into the airlock and stretches his lanky, trembling limbs out over the sealed doors.

Holden sinks to his knees on the dock and stares at the doors. She's still here. The Rocinante, Naomi. She didn't leave. He's pretty sure she should have left, but there's nothing he can do about that now. He lays down, and the chill of metal against his bare face and palms feels good for a while before his fever is driven to the other extreme and he finds himself shivering violently. His mind strays to the girl in the shower with her leg bent at an unnatural angle, the bursts of crystals like sap solidifies from the wound in a tree trunk, the desperate people who moaned as they tumbled out of the trolley cars, afraid and dying and still clinging to hope. Holden tries to slip away. He thinks instead of the smell of Father Tom's tobacco, and the gleam of sunlight on a frozen lake as his parents taught him how to ice skate, and Hazel sliding up and down snowbanks in penguin form...

He hears a hiss of air, like a punctured tractor tire settling into the dirt, or a pneumatic lock releasing.

"Hello angel," Miller murmurs.

Holden opens his eyes. Amos is standing in the airlock with Lysandra at his side, looking faintly inconvenienced by their arrival.

"You guys look like shit."

Miller laughs. Amos drags him into the Rocinante first, Lysandra delicately holding the sparrow's limp body between her teeth, and Holden closes his eyes again as Miller's blood-splattered boots vanish out of view. A moment later he feels vibrations in the dock. Amos' heavy magboots _clang_ rhythmically against the ladder. He stops at the top and gives Holden and Hazel a critical look.

"You're not getting down the ladder, are you?" Amos asks, and it's a quiet shock to realize he's talking to Hazel directly, Lysandra silent and out of sight. But then, it's Amos, why not.

Hazel murmurs an exhausted no.

"All right," Amos says, tossing a shock blanket over her flank, a new and shiny one with the fold lines still crisp. "No way around it, I'm gonna carry you down. I'll try not to touch you but this is gonna be tricky. What's your range again?"

"About six feet," Holden murmurs. He watches distantly as Amos tucks the shock blanket around Hazel and glances over his shoulder at the drop.

"Hmm," Amos says, unreadable. "Yeah, that's gonna hurt."

Holden feels a lurch in his stomach as Amos picks his soul up, her head hanging low out of the blanket burrito Amos has wrapped her up in. The radiation has made him nauseated already - as Amos steps down the ladder one careful rung after another and the distance between him and Hazel stretches painfully taut, Holden leans over and retches.

Amos carries them down to the medbay in stages. Holden passes in and out of consciousness in his arms. Once he thinks he sees the flash of Lysandra's amber eyes in a corner, but otherwise she stays entirely out of sight.

In the medbay Naomi has already hooked up Miller to the autodoc. Amos lays Holden in the next chair and Umai makes a flying leap across the gap, landing on the armrest as she circles around to examine him.

"You waited," Holden gasps. Naomi's face is a blur through unshed tears, but he thinks he sees her smile. He's only seen it a few times but he's memorized it already. He'd know it from the curve of her cheek seen from over her shoulder, or hear it in her voice. He'd know it.

Umai touches Hazel's cheek gently and he sucks in a shuddering breath. Something sparks at the contact. Holden has seen trees in the aftermath of lightning storms, charred and cracked apart, like a nerve exposed to every passing wind. He thinks of those trees now. Thinks of a massive eye opening. Thinks of the bottom of the ocean, dark and crushing, and a ghostly light up ahead.

"Naomi," he says.

A surrender. He blinks and the image clarifies. He's still alive, somehow, and she's definitely smiling.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello! I'm new to The Expanse and this is my first fic for this fandom, but I'm hoping to write more. I'm also on tumblr as [kindclaws](https://kindclaws.tumblr.com) and I don't have a lot of my beloved Roci crew on my dash, so if you're active on tumblr PLEASE feel free to comment on this fic with your username, you'd be doing me a favour. I may be late to the party but I am so fucking ready for season 4.
> 
> Thanks for reading this fic! I'm planning on writing one chapter of this au for each season of the show. Please check the last chapter of this fic for a full and detailed glossary of each character's daemon, especially if anything was unclear! This chapter was very Naomi and Holden and Miller heavy, next chapter will introduce Bobbie and Prax, and feature more Chrisjen, Alex, and Amos. :) Fic title taken from this quote: "An ocean without its unnamed monsters would be like a completely dreamless sleep." - John Steinbeck from The Log From the Sea of Cortez.
> 
> If you're not familiar with HDM but enjoyed the daemons - there's a His Dark Materials show coming out VERY SOON. It looks quite promising and Lin Manuel Miranda is in it and has a hot air balloon.


	2. daemonology

**DAEMONS INTRODUCED IN SEASON 1/CHAPTER 1**

**Holden** is a [white-tailed doe](http://justfunfacts.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/white-tailed-deer.jpg) named Hazel, after one of the characters in [Watership Down](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watership_Down), which seemed like a book Elise would have on her shelf. I picked doe bc I wanted him to have a visibly "Earther" daemon, bc stags are often "king of the forest" and I wanted a subtle Montana royalty vibe, and because I think she would suit Holden's reputation and be underestimated. No one thinks a doe is gonna fuck your shit up until she does, right?

**Naomi** is a [common squirrel monkey](https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/folly-farm.co.uk/uploads/2018/03/baby-squirrel-monkey-at-folly-farm.jpg), picked bc she seems so practical and I loved the idea that her daemon would give her an extra pair of hands to work with. Umai is a Japanese word for skillful, dexterous and a nod to Naomi's implied Japanese heritage, as far as I know it is not traditionally used as a name. My headcanon is that she doesn't know what Umai means or comes from. I don't know enough about her backstory yet to guess who might have named him but in general, I'm guessing Belters' links to their Earthbound past are tenuous. Also, common squirrel monkeys are literally so cute omg I spent so long looking at monkey pictures for this fic, only the best for Naomi.

My friend @marauders-groupie suggested a dog for **Alex** and I loved that because it was a perfect opportunity to play with expectations and stereotypes and Alex's own yearning to do good in the galaxy, y'know? In the HDM universe dogs are considered a sign that someone is very down to Earth and reliable and obedient and family-focused, and Alex is those things... but not in the way everyone expected him to be. I chose [greyhounds](https://www.vetcarepethospital.ca/wp-content/uploads/sites/17/2018/11/shutterstock_523160830.jpg) because zoom. Her name, Aashritha, is a Hindi name meaning "someone who gives shelter." For a loyal Martian family dedicated to the terraforming effort it's a perfect name. Alex hasn't quite accepted it yet - more on that later. Also, I didn't find out the greyhounds can come in colours that aren't grey until literally just now.

**Amos** is a [bobcat ](https://resize.hswstatic.com/w_907/gif/bobcat-2.jpg)named Lysandra. I don't know much about his backstory yet, but I wanted his daemon to be a predator, but a small one that could fly under the radar. Also, bobcat faces give me the same vibes that Amos' face gives me, I can't explain it. Lysandra was not chosen for a particular origin or meaning, just a name that I overheard in a conversation while brainstorming. He'll have a bigger part to play in later chapters and I cannot wait to reveal it.

For **Chrisjen** I originally considered a fox, @marauders-groupie suggested something like a lion, but I really, really love terrifying/awful/inconvenient/untraditional daemons, so I picked a trapdoor spider. I'm really scared of spiders, but I was lucky enough to see a few on a trip to the Amazon. I never want to see them again, but it was pretty cool, and I love Chrisjen just intimidating everyone by wearing her ugly-ass phobia-inducing daemon in her hair for all to see. I think he'd be a great asset in politics. Abhay is a Hindi name meaning fearless. Unlike Naomi's forebearers, Chrisjen's dad knew exactly what he was naming her. I am not including a link to a photo bc I don't love anyone enough to look at photos of trapdoor spiders.

For **Julie**, I googled [razorbacks](https://wallpapercave.com/wp/wp3065139.jpg), and apparently they're a type of wild boar which I think Julie would get a huge kick out of disappointing her parents with, but I don't like wild boars because I got lost in the Amazon as a child and ran into a pack of them and totally thought I was going to die. 0/10. However the internet helpfully recommended [razor_bills_ ](https://www.audubon.org/sites/default/files/styles/hero_cover_bird_page/public/Razorbill_TonySmith_FlickrCC_314.jpg?itok=kpwPfTJd)to me, a diving seabird, and I was like, _awesome, ocean-y space metaphors galore_ and between the Scopuli, Miller's sparrow, and her dating profile name, Julie already has a lot of canon bird references. In this universe the Razorback was named the Razorbill all along. Julie's daemon is named [Iphigenia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iphigenia), after the daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. The Mao family clearly digs their mythology, if the names of their kids and stealth ships are anything to go by, and I think Jules-Pierre, asshole capitalist extraordinaire, would find it poetic that the original Iphigenia was also sacrificed for her father's war. <strike>Can you tell I have a lot of feelings about a bunch of men deciding Julie's story is about them?</strike>

**Miller** is a [sparrow ](http://eleven-thirtyeight.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/expanse-bird.gif)just like the one he keeps seeing in the show. Small, spirited, kind of vulnerable, very Belter. As is her name - Pip. For a while he's embarrassed that it's not an elegant, complicated name like Earther daemons traditionally have, and eventually he runs out of fucks. 

**Jules-Pierre Mao** is a [great blue heron](https://www.logerenbijdemolen.nl/sites/default/files/styles/galley_full/public/Heron_in_the_Water.jpg?itok=Zz3c137v) bc they are sneaky patient assholes. She is named Zarathustra, from Nietzsche's [Thus Spoke Zarathustra](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thus_Spoke_Zarathustra) because it is the sort of pretentious name an Earther aristocrat would give their progeny and if you read/skim through the Ubermensch stuff with the events of season 2/Caliban's War in mind it's uh, very fitting. I don't blame you if you don't though, because Nietzsche comes across as like, trying his darn hardest to be utterly incomprehensible.

**Fred Johnson** is a motherfucking [grizzly bear](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/content/dam/news/2016/03/04/grizzly_delisting/01grizzlydelisting.jpg) bc I wanted to take the "Earther daemons are huge" stereotype to the extreme. He usually calls her Ozy, short for Ozymandius from [this Shelley poem](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46565/ozymandias). She's incredibly imposing and because of her, Fred stands out and is recognized everywhere he goes, forever marking him an outsider. 

**Sadavir Errenwright** is a [blue-ringed octopus](https://www-tc.pbs.org/wnet/nature/files/2008/09/Octopus-BlueRinged.jpg), infamously one of the most dangerous creatures in the world. They are very tiny, and very deadly. I needed more marine daemons, and like, can YOU read an octopus' body language????? Didn't think so.   
  
  
  
**DAEMONS INTRODUCED IN SEASON 2/CHAPTER 2**  
  
Coming soon!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A note: I've done my best to choose and research appropriate names, but corrections and criticism are welcome! Ie - if I've mistakenly given the masculine version of a name instead of the feminine one, or if babynames.com lied and "so-and-so" is not a real name or does not actually mean what I think it means, or if there's a mistake in the origins or spelling or context - whatever it is, feel free to let me know. The one thing I can think of right now is that I don't think "Umai" is a name, but there's an in-universe explanation for that, so I'm going with it for now.
> 
> In general, comments like "I think blank could have been a good daemon for blank!" are totally welcome and I've literally formed friendships in ao3 comment sections with people who had a lot of ideas and enthusiasm. Comments along the lines of "fuck you blank is a bad daemon and you're a bad writer who doesn't understand the characters" bleh, none of that thank you. But the Expanse fandom seems to be small enough that there aren't noticeable bad apples, so, I'm not v worried, and excited to join in!
> 
> Thank you for reading!


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